Fun facts
I have an unusual habit of being in the room, or at least in the frame, when something happens. None of what follows is on the resume.
Some of it ends up in the talks, usually not on purpose. If you're programming an event and wondering what I'm like when the slides stop, this is a faster answer than another paragraph about growth.
My great-grandfather made the scales at Katz's. Every pastrami sandwich in that building has been weighed by my family for about a hundred years.
I went to Stuyvesant, which is where they shot Hackers, which is where Angelina Jolie met her first husband. Three degrees of separation and I'm still not in the movie.
I was bar mitzvahed in the synagogue where Mrs. Maisel's husband gets arrested.
I'm in it. Briefly. You have to know where to look.
I'm directly in front of Johnny Rzeznik in the band's Storytellers episode, which means I'm in frame for most of it.
I'm in a Macy Gray Mountain Dew commercial, mouthing the words “that's not Macy Gray.”
Evil Jake's music was on Real World, Road Rules and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. We were, briefly, the sound of early-2000s basic cable.
IMDb lists Jack Black's character as partly based on me. I didn't put it there.
Three times. Once for my wedding, once for my name, and once for being the bad date.
I was on a float in the 50th global Pride parade.
Season tickets, and an unexplained gravitational pull toward the jumbotron. There are viral TikToks of me dancing in the street after Game 5.
My father worked it, so the comedy part isn't a bit.
The other half
Everything above is coincidence. This part is not, though it reads the same way: I keep turning up right as a thing becomes the thing. The awards are the receipts, and they trace the last twenty years of marketing almost in order.
Commission Junction named my agency Agency of the Year, back when affiliate was the whole performance industry.
A US Search Award, an AdAge Marketers of the Year, and an influencer award in the same year, which is roughly when those three stopped being separate jobs.
Best Paid Social Campaign at the Performance Marketing Awards, in the last window before the iOS privacy changes rewrote the rules.
Best Use of Creator Content at the US Partnership Awards, when creators stopped being a media buy and became a channel.
Influencer marketing awards two years running, including at the Global Performance Marketing Awards.
Named to The Direct 60 by The Lead, for an argument about judgment and point of view mattering more as AI makes creation cheap.
Which is how you end up being the Forrest Gump of something. Not by planning, just by being in the room enough times.
The through line, if there is one. I have spent most of my life a few feet outside the actual event, which turns out to be decent training for growth work. The job is usually to notice what's already happening and get in position before anyone else does.